[diordiderot]

> Overhead wires would involve a significant infrastructure investment.

Yeah building dozens of large scale hydrogen plants, trenching and welding pipelines, building massive excess of necessary renewable energy, figuring distribution networks, deciding storage & container standards, house retrofits etc to run our society will be much easier than ...(checks notes)... Hanging wires

[Manuel_D]

A hydrogen economy is likely going to be developed anyway, to decarbonize air transport and maritime shipping. Piggy backing on top of this maybe be cheaper than the ~$700 billion (probably closer to a trillion if we include Canadian rail) required to electrify North American rail transport.

[hedora]

Most rail stations are wired for water and electricity already, and small scale hydrogen crackers are already being deployed commercially in the US.

That addresses all your concerns, except maybe that people will want to produce hydrogen at home from their own solar arrays. That's expensive, but arguably unnecessary, since the hydrogen would mostly just be used to power cars.